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Drawing skills helped a man in China who was kidnapped as a child (symbol image)
Photo: boonchai wedmakawand / Getty Images
For us in Europe, the first of January is often a half-leisurely, half-sluggish holiday. You take a walk, make a few phone calls, maybe watch a movie, catch up on missed sleep.
For a family man in China, however, the day this year was an unforgettable experience: for the first time in 33 years he saw his mother again.
According to several media reports, the 37-year-old Li Jingwei was lured away from his home at the age of four and sold to a human trafficking ring.
He grew up in a different province - around 2,000 kilometers from the village he actually came from.
According to reports, he could not remember his name or the names of his birth parents for years.
Previous attempts to find them had failed in recent years.
He drew a map and posted it online
But then Li picked up pen and paper and drew a map of the village as he remembered it.
On December 24th, he posted a clip on the Chinese video portal Douyin, in which he explains the map and tells his story.
With the help of the authorities and a DNA analysis, his mother was found, who lived in a mountain village in Yunnan and had reported a son as missing.
On Saturday, the two met for the first time in more than three decades.
Li carefully removed the mouth and nose protection from his mother and then hugged her in tears, reports the BBC.
"Thanks to everyone who helped me find my family," Li wrote in Douyin.
Child abductions have been common in China since the 1980s.
The background was the strict one-child policy of the communist leadership.
Many couples wanted males, and traffickers kidnapped boys and sold them to childless couples.
The government has now ended this restrictive birth policy and allows couples to have three children.
There had been other high-profile reunions in the past year: Li told Chinese media that the Guo Gangtang case spurred him to keep looking for his family.
Guo's son was kidnapped from the family home in a village in east China's Shandong Province in 1997.
The father looked for him in almost all of China: he toured the country on his motorcycle to which he had attached a picture of his son and distributed leaflets.
In June, police in central China's Henan Province tracked down a man who later turned out to be Guo Gangtang's son.
By the time that meeting took place, Guo Gangtang had covered a total of about 500,000 kilometers on the motorcycle.
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